


Steps Ascending

by inkforhumanhands



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Foggy Nelson Is a Good Bro, Gen, Law School, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Muffins, Past Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28753050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkforhumanhands/pseuds/inkforhumanhands
Summary: Post-break up with Elektra, Matt finds himself too depressed to pick up the pieces of his life and finish out his semester of law school. Luckily Foggy intervenes with a little pick-me-up to get Matt jump-started again.
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Comments: 17
Kudos: 39
Collections: DDE’s 2021 New Year’s Day Exchange





	Steps Ascending

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pogopop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pogopop/gifts).



> So so so (x1000) sorry this is as late as it is! Please forgive me and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Prompts used were "spiral" and the song Pacifier by Shihad, particularly the lyrics:  
>  _Do you know what the time is?  
>  Is it messing with your mind, kid?  
> Are you hurting all the time  
> And you need a pacifier?  
> Come on, let's take a look outside_
> 
> Also despite the angsty first line this is actually very fluffy. :)
> 
> There's a reference to the band Nine Inch Nails in here, and the joke is that they have an album called The Downward Spiral. 
> 
> And finally, I took liberties with Columbia's dining system, so my apologies to anyone who actually goes/has gone there.

Matt didn’t so much spiral downward as plummet, but it didn’t stop him from using the metaphor. The truth of the matter was he would have followed Elektra off a cliff, and as far as the rest of his life was concerned, he had. He’d no sooner blinked than half of his second semester had elapsed and he’d yet to attend class beyond each respective first day. He no longer slept, for what was the attraction there when his bed—if they even made it to it—held a very different promise?

On one of the rare occasions Matt returned to his room in daylight, Foggy handed him a crumpled up piece of paper and he’d been forced to ask what was on it. Foggy said he’d gotten it from the eco people. That they’d been going on about campus plastic use and how it was “not sustainable.” No one ever talked straight these days.

No one except for Elektra. That was half of what made her appealing. There was freedom in having his secrets laid bare, in having someone else’s gaze bore into his insides in the same invasive way Matt’s senses were always telling him things he shouldn’t know about others. Finally he’d had an equal. So what if in the end it turned out they’d both misjudged each other? 

After all, Matt now found himself privy to a secret about endings: in the same way you never quite reach the bottom of a hole if you don’t stop digging, Matt kept his relationship with Elektra from a final death, if only in his mind. It was the scab he couldn’t resist worrying.

He was worrying Foggy, too, or so he gathered from a conversation carried to him on the backs of echoes escaped from the walls of the kitchenette down the hall:

“What if he drops out, Rob?”

“Is that really your problem?” their RA sighed as he removed his Easy Mac from the microwave, sounding an awful lot like he’d heard Foggy voice similar concerns before.

“Yes! He’s my friend!” came Foggy’s indignant reply. Matt buried his head further inside his tomb of blankets back in their room, feeling _guilt guilt guilt_.

Days passed, and still none of the sighs Foggy leveraged Matt’s way could get him out of bed, let alone to class. He let his memories swallow him up, content to lie there in the pit of their stomach, sheltered from time passing on the outside. But Foggy, Matt had his suspicions, had made it his mission to get him out from the belly of the beast somehow or other. So the day Foggy decided to implement phase one, it didn’t come as much of a surprise that there _was_ a phase one so much as it was surprising what Foggy had decided to do with it.

Matt had awoken to an empty room, devoid of the subtle rhythms that usually signaled Foggy’s presence. He rolled over, intending to go back to sleep, when he caught the distant aroma of still-warm chocolate chip muffin and the far-off notes of someone humming a bright tune in Foggy’s voice. Matt tracked both on their approach to his and Foggy’s room. The humming stopped on the other side of the door, though the tantalizing muffin smell crept in further, uninhibited. Matt breathed in deeply, at the same time trying in vain to suppress the urges of his stomach mid-rumble, and tried not to get his hopes up about the prospect of breakfast.

A key jingled in the lock, and, sure enough, Foggy walked through the door, and he did so harboring fresh muffins. Fresh muffins from the best and farthest dining hall on campus, specifically, if Matt’s senses were to be trusted. But Matt didn’t want to jump to any conclusions about what this all meant. He tucked his feet back up into his comforter and waited for Foggy to say something.

He didn’t have to wait long. “Matt, my fine feathered friend,” Foggy said nonsensically from his spot by the door, “guess what I have procured for you on this dewy morning.”

Matt answered, a little bit breathless with anticipation, “You _didn’t_.”

“Oh, but I did,” Foggy said, and Matt didn’t have to extrapolate much from his tone of voice to know, even without focusing his senses, that Foggy had adopted the wide stance he always did whenever he acted smug. There was some rustling as Foggy reached into his coat pocket, and then the smooth, airy glide of a napkin skimming the hardwood floor as it fell. “Damn it,” Foggy muttered as he did some more shuffling.

Matt almost cracked a smile before he remembered he was supposed to be brooding. Columbia’s dining halls had an all-you-can-eat policy that extended to takeout—as long as students brought their own containers. Or, as Foggy liked to think he’d innovated as a workaround for the days he left his Tupperware at home, as long as they could slap enough napkins together for a makeshift little knapsack. (Foggy elbowed Matt in the ribs when he didn’t laugh the first time Foggy had made the pun.)

Foggy approached Matt’s bedside. “You might want to sit up,” he advised him. “It got kind of smooshed so it’ll crumble everywhere if you’re not careful.”

“Maybe,” Matt said as he took the suggestion, “your knapsack method isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” A warm and mildly greasy lump of napkin-covered muffin plopped down into Matt’s outstretched palms accompanied by a scoff.

“Nelson’s Patented Knapsack Method TM is a flawless system, thank you very much. Unfortunately,” Foggy sniffed, “it may have met its match in Charlie. I’m still not used to riding him.”

Charlie was the bike someone or other who’d graduated had abandoned to a rusty fate in the bike rack by their dorm. Since then, it had changed hands countless times until somebody had suggested their floor share it, and now it was faithful companion to those running especially late to class. Or, as seemed to be the case here, faithful conveyer of chocolate chip muffins and those who showed no qualms about transporting them inside jacket pockets with but a thin covering of napkin to protect them.

“Sure, blame Charlie,” Matt said blithely, and was surprised at his own blitheness. He peeled back the top napkin, placed it on the desk pushed up right beside his bed, and flipped the “knapsack” over the other way to repeat the process until he’d broken through to precious golden crust. Of all the things to beat out Elektra for his attention.

“Look, of course you would find ‘poor old’ Charlie innocent, but you’ve never had to put your butt on that contraption either.”

Matt hummed in agreement for this was true, and, anyway, he now had a mouth full of that lush muffin fluff with its melty chocolate accents; he had left this plane of existence and gone straight to heaven. Foggy made a noise expressing a similar sentiment as he, too, took his first bite. The familiar whirl of his swivel chair set up across the way completed their picture of bliss.

For Matt, who had always been capable of “living in the moment” so long as the moment in question were one of doubt, or, most recently, heartbreak, this bit of genuine indulgence was a revelation. When he’d finally coaxed every last morsel of sweetness from his muffin, he took advantage of Foggy’s comparable slowness with his to raise his suspicions about the muffins’ origin.

“You picked these up from Blue Java, didn’t you?”

There was an “rmhph” as Foggy swallowed the remains of his breakfast treat. “Matt,” he said, a series of wet smacking noises popping off the ends of his fingers as he licked them before continuing, “are you insinuating that I would not only bike twice as far as John Jay to grab you the superior muffin, but also use my painstakingly earned work study cash? Because yes, I would do exactly that and I don’t want to hear any complaints about it, either.” The wetness on his pointer finger that he had yet to wipe away sang in the air as he wagged it.

“No complaints,” Matt promised. He wiped the grease off his own fingers with one of the cleaner napkins. “Just wanted to let you know I noticed.” He dipped his head. It had been a while since he’d allowed himself to notice anyone or anything besides Elektra. Yet here was Foggy, his roommate and friend, suddenly more vivid and real than Matt had felt in weeks. All because of a muffin, albeit a superior one. “…And to say thank you,” he added.

“Look,” Foggy said, in that stern-yet-yielding way of his that made it easy to imagine his potential future as a law professor, “I know things have been…rough.”

Matt laughed half-heartedly. “Yeah,” he agreed.

“But—and don’t get mad at me—it’s hard to see you like this. A muffin isn’t much, I know. I’m not so self-important as to think that I’ve really changed anything. But I wanted to let you know that I’m here to offer my support if you want to get back into things.”

Matt averted his face. He knew Foggy was right—that it was time to, if not let Elektra go, at least break her memory’s hold on the rest of his life. The problem was he didn’t know where to start. “But how?” he asked earnestly. “There are, what, six weeks of class left? How am I ever going to catch up?”

“Well,” Foggy began, and if the way the word curved in his mouth like it was said through a smile didn’t tip Matt off that he had something up his sleeve, then the wooden slide of Foggy’s desk drawer sure did, “I figured you would ask that, so I came prepared. You know, like in Boy Scouts.”

“Foggy, you were never in Boy Scouts.”

“Not physically, no. But spiritually? Heck yeah, my dude. Anyway, stop derailing me,” Foggy huffed. His shoes scuffled across the floor as he dragged himself closer to Matt in his chair. “Here,” he said, and placed a piece of cool, rectangular plastic in Matt’s hand.

Matt raised an eyebrow. “What’s this?” he asked. He rotated the plastic in his fingers, the weight of it betraying the stick of metal capped within: it was a USB drive, but what for?

“That,” Foggy announced, “is how you get yourself back in the game. It has all the notes from the classes you missed, plus summaries of all the readings so you don’t have to waste time going through them yourself.”

Too stunned to process the implications of what Foggy just told him, Matt said instead, “Foggy, you’re not even in all my classes. How…?”

Foggy clasped a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Yeah, well, I had to crowdsource a bit. Luckily your pal here is very good at schmoozing.” Foggy took his hand back to point in a twirling gesture at his face. “Please imagine me here with a fancy mustache and a glass of wine schmoozing with your classmates. Making illicit agreements with style.”

“I’m sure your schmoozing was legendary,” Matt said, still in awe at the feat Foggy had managed for him. A muffin from Blue Java was one thing, but this? With the notes Foggy had compiled for him he might still have a shot at passing, as long as he groveled to his professors for them to waive a few of his absences. “But honestly, Foggy, I don’t know what to say. _Thank you_. Seriously.”

“Eh, it was nothing,” Foggy dismissed him with a wave that sent a breeze across his face. “I just kept going over what you said about being on a downward spiral. Everyone’s always talking about downward spirals. You. Nine Inch Nails. Other people. But why can’t it be the opposite? There are spiral staircases. I just wanted to show you that your spiral has stairs too, buddy, and they’re waiting for you if you decide to take them.”

Matt’s throat tightened. He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve a friend like Foggy, but he swore in that instant that he’d never let him go.

“So if the notes are the stairs in this metaphor,” he asked, barely keeping the wobble out of his tone, “what about the muffin?”

“Can’t expect you to climb any stairs on an empty stomach, duh.”


End file.
